New Blu-ray Discs to Expand Copy Protection, Bypass AACS Troubles
With a minimum of fanfare, the licensing body for the developers of a supplemental copy protection technology exclusively for Blu-ray Disc announced its initial specification for BD+ - which supporters had hoped would be available early last year - is finally ready for licensing to developers. 20th Century-Fox appears to be the first to board the bandwagon, having obtained a license for its developers to write for a virtual machine that will be embedded in future BD-ROM player devices.
One of the original sticking points between studios and technologists over high-definition disc formats concerned a provision of Advanced Access Copy System (AACS) copy protection that enables content providers to revoke a player's ability to decrypt new discs' content if the integrity of that content is found to be compromised for that player - in other words, if someone has hacked into the access keys and has posted them online, enabling others to copy the content.
Trade Commission Upholds Qualcomm Chip Ban
After having waited for a jury's verdict last month to withstand judicial review, the International Trade Commission this morning upheld a decision to ban the import of certain goods containing Qualcomm chipsets into the US. The banned devices are mobile handsets whose use of EV-DO and W-CDMA technology was found to have infringed upon three of Broadcom's patents.
The ITC's decision appears to draw to a close one of the largest and costliest intellectual property battles in electronics history, with Broadcom emerging as the victor.
Vista Security Report Raises More Doubts Than It Relieves
When Microsoft's director of its Security Technology Unit Jeffrey Jones previewed a report that was soon to be published about the number of reported and addressed vulnerabilities in Windows Vista over the first six months of its consumer market shelf life, at TechEd in Orlando two weeks ago, the generally confused and negative reaction among attendees who ended up arguing with Jones for most of the session, prompted BetaNews (who was there) to decide that, amid the other news emerging that week, it wasn't worth covering.
The essence of the report is that Windows Vista had a far fewer number of reported security vulnerabilities during its first six months not only than Windows XP after its introduction, as recorded in the US National Vulnerability Database, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 WS, Ubuntu 6.06 Long Term Support Desktop, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, and Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger).
Google's Growth in Search Continues to Outpace Yahoo, MSN
When Jerry Yang stepped into the Yahoo CEO seat vacated earlier this week by Terry Semel, analysts said his goal may very well be to move Yahoo away from its all-things-media evolutionary path, and return it to its roots in search. If that's the case, then Yahoo has its work cut out for it, if today's numbers from Nielsen/NetRatings are to be taken seriously.
While the Panama search technology has indeed helped Yahoo step on the accelerator pedal, the Nielsen numbers suggest Google has already found overdrive. While Yahoo continues to command the largest number of URL destinations by many estimates, including Nielsen's, Google handled a 56.3% share of all US-based Web searches conducted during May, gaining over 22 points in market share in just one year's time, and handling 44.9% more searches now than it did in May 2006.
Verizon Tries Out DNS Redirection Service, But Will It Charge?
Last week, customers of Verizon's ISPs in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin learned of an interesting alteration to their Internet service: The company is experimenting with what it's calling an "Advanced Web Search" page, which its DNS servers will distribute in response to non-resolvable or perhaps malformed URLs.
Instead of the typical error message a DNS server provides, Verizon's new page would offer users assistance for perhaps getting the URL they're actually looking for. It's a service not unlike one offered by regional phone companies to land-line users, which can interrupt "out-of-service" messages and ask users if they'd like to speak to an operator.
AMD CEO: Intel Is a Monopoly, Microsoft Isn't
In a keynote address this morning to the American Antitrust Institute in Washington, D.C., AMD CEO Hector Ruiz gave attendees what he described as "an idea of what it's like to do business day in and day out when you are competing against an abusive monopolist." Although he also invoked the phrase "illegal monopoly," he left a convenient 846-word buffer zone between that phrase and his first invocation of the term "Intel."
"I do not need my fortune teller hat to tell you one truth about which I am absolutely certain," Ruiz told attendees, "There is no proper or defensible place for illegal monopolies in the 21st century global marketplace...My purpose is not to argue for competitive advantage - we know how to compete. My purpose is to lay out the facts so that law and economics can do their job to protect consumers."
Yet Another Royalties Tier for Internet Radio?
While Congress continues to back-burner the debate over whether it's fair for streaming radio services to be charged as much as ten times their revenue in performance royalties, the US Copyright Royalty Board last week met for a roundtable discussion about whether yet another class of royalties that are already part of copyright law, should apply to Internet radio as well.
The class being discussed is the "mechanical royalty" - a fee collected for the right to make a reproduction of a recording, or what the law calls a phonorecord. The basic meaning of the royalty is quite sensible: When you have a record, and you want to make records off of that master for reproduction and possible sale, you owe a mechanical royalty fee for each reproduction. Historically, that fee has been set at a flat rate of $0.09 cents per copy.
NVidia Enters Computer Business with 'Deskside Supercomputer'
While ATI and its newfound parent AMD continue discussing the potential benefits of actually pairing their technologies into one cohesive unit, now that their companies have been paired together in a similar fashion, their principal rival in the graphics arena decided it isn't waiting to make a similar play with Intel.
NVidia today may have launched the stand-alone GPU-centric computer business all by its lonesome, with today's announcement of a kind of computer system specifically designed to mesh graphics processors together to perform rich math functions.
Xerox Reignites Interest in Semantic Networking as a Search Tool
The Associated Press this morning hailed a new Xerox innovation that aims to take search engine indexing capabilities "to the next level," with a public unveiling of a semantic networking tool it plans to integrate into its FactSpotter legal document search system. It's being described as the next stage in textual indexing development, and the culmination of a four-year project at Xerox's European research center in Grenoble, France.
But semantic networking has not only been the "next level" of indexing for longer than four years, it's been a factor in indexing since long before the inception of the World-Wide Web. In fact, it was a natural outgrowth of research into hypertext that led to the Web's very creation.
Who Flipped and Who Flopped on Microsoft's Vista Virtualization Licensing?
Last February, a Microsoft Windows Vista client team product manager was quoted by the Associated Press as having said that his company actively considered canceling virtualization support in Vista after a Black Hat security demonstrator showed a tool that could leverage virtualization capabilities to make the operating system blindly run within a malware hypervisor. That claim has since been denied by Microsoft representatives who work more closely with, or who lead, its virtualization projects.
This morning, sources cited the same team product manager, Scott Woodgate, as having indicated his company would be announcing a licensing change to Windows Vista with respect to virtualization, perhaps today. Consumers were to expect Vista licenses adjustments to enable Vista Home Basic and Vista Home Premium editions to run in virtualized environments, perhaps supported by Mac OS X or VMware. When such an announcement did not come, and when the company issued a brief statement to reporters indicating it would not come, it was reported that Microsoft "flip-flopped" on virtualization.
Microsoft Concedes to Google and States, Will Change Vista Search
In agreeing to make what could be described technically as a minor change to the way it handles its options for consumer desktop search, Microsoft last night may have made its most symbolically significant statement to date with regard to its current stance in the technology market: It backed down, in response to a complaint from Google that its placement of desktop search capabilities within Windows Vista constituted a breach of its antitrust settlement agreement with the US and states' governments regarding middleware.
The question centered around Windows Desktop Search, a feature built into Vista but which essentially competes with Google Desktop Search, which a user must download separately and install intentionally. Google filed a formal complaint, which it never formally acknowledged or even publicly mentioned, but whose existence was finally entered into the public record yesterday by the US Justice Dept.
E-mail Account Holders Have Right to Privacy, Appeals Court Upholds
A US federal appeals court yesterday upheld a district court ruling in favor of an individual whose e-mail records were copied by government investigators from servers at Yahoo and another ISP. In finding that the government violated Steven Warshak's Fourth Amendments rights against unreasonable search and seizure, it may have prevented the government from loosely applying a key tool in its ability to obtain e-mail records without a warrant: the Stored Communications Act (SCA).
Warshak was the subject of a 2005 criminal investigation of himself and his company, which apparently sold vitamin supplements. In March of that year, investigators obtained an order from a federal magistrate to acquire e-mail records from Warshak's NuVox account, ordering NuVox not to disclose even the existence of that order for at least 90 days. Later in September, the government issued a similar request to Yahoo. Both complied.
Touch-Feedback Creator Immersion Sued by Microsoft Over Sony Settlement
Did Immersion - the patent holder for tactile feedback devices used in game controllers - settle its lawsuit against Sony for building "rumble" into its PlayStation 2 joysticks without a license? BetaNews reported in March the sides did settle, but now Immersion may be trying to characterize the pact with Sony as a licensing agreement instead.
The difference is very, very material, because it makes all the difference as to whether Immersion owes Microsoft as much as $20.8 million. This morning, Microsoft sued Immersion in US District Court in Washington State, claiming that as part of the terms of settlement of Immersion's lawsuit against Microsoft -- which came at the same time as the one against Sony -- Microsoft only agreed to pay Immersion $26 million if it would agree in turn to repay Microsoft a portion of any settlement payments it received from Sony.
Multi-Middleman 'Mpack' Attacks Use Google AdWords to Lure Victims
One of Russia's fastest growing markets, and quite possibly a contributor to stabilizing that country's fickle economy, is cut-rate, self-deploying Trojan horse packages.
As malware writers there have discovered, rather than baiting and waiting for victims to fall into their traps at random, so that they carry out DoS and identity theft attacks without knowing they're doing so, would-be victims worldwide will gladly pay for the privilege of knowingly carrying out those same attacks.
Yahoo's Semel Steps Down as CEO; Yang Assumes Top Post
After what may have been the weakest show of support for the company's executive team in last week's shareholders' meeting, Terry Semel has resigned the post of CEO of Yahoo this afternoon, as has accepted the post of non-executive chairman of the company's board of directors. The company's co-founder and "co-chief Yahoo," Jerry Yang will take Semel's place, in a move apparently intended to return the company to its roots as a pioneer of Internet technologies.
Semel's departure marks another failure for former media executives at the helm of Internet companies, having spent nearly a quarter-century prior to Yahoo at Warner Bros., most recently as co-CEO.
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